Origin of life video

I just did a reddit Science AMA today, and whenever you talk about evolution, invariably the question of the origin of life comes up. It's not my field, as I am not a chemist, but here is a great video explaining a model of how life could have formed spontaneously from chemical elements in the pre-biotic Earth. It is based on research from Jack Szostak's lab.

From now on I will be pointing to this whenever I'm asked how the first cells came about.

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.